SPIonic Conversion
Uncategorized 14/12/2010
SPIonic is a public domain font that represents ASCII characters as Greek letters and diacritics. It is widely used to represent polytonic Greek, that is, ancient Greek, which has other tone marks in addition to the acute (´) found in modern Greek. It uses a scheme based on Beta Code with a few variations, the most significant of which is that uppercase letters are represented by uppercase letters and lowercase by lowercase (whereas Beta Code uses *A for uppercase alpha and A for lowercase alpha, etc.). I’ve created a simple tool that will convert Greek written using this scheme into proper Unicode Greek. For example, in Unicode the letter alpha is represented, not by typing the character a, but by an α character at a separate code point in the font. Though I’m sure something like this is not in high demand, I hope somebody out there finds it useful.
Just found your very useful tool — perfect for preparing the second edition of a text that cites some Greek.
One glitch I’ve noticed: the program creates ἔ with a smooth breathing and acute accent even when it should have only the smooth breathing, not the accent.
Thanks!
Upsilon and iota have the same problem.
Otherwise, no trouble. Thanks again, you have saved me a lot of tedious work.